Your Place in Hell
posted by Sybil Vane
I don't believe in hell, actually. But Bill Donohue makes me wish so badly for it. See his recent full-page ad in the NYT claiming that what the church is dealing with always has been, and continues to be, not a pedophilia crisis but a "homosexual crisis." Note that this ad takes as its primary purpose the attacking of the NYT as anti-Catholic.
What we have here, in other words, is a failure to communicate,
My god, how lucky we are that someone is around to stick up for the poor disempowered Catholic church.
Sometimes I ask my students in 100 level classes to discuss the extent to which we are living in a patriarchy. I do the thing where I say, 'if an alien came to the planet and look around, would it conclude as much?' And while most of them realize, yes, it would, always a handful of students (always male) want to talk about how if the alien could somehow look at how far we've come, the progress we've made, could compare our enlightened culture to the barbarians in the middle-east, well, surely then the alien would realize how commendable we are! Just happened yesterday, in fact. Always someone is unwilling to look at the actual unflattering thing I asked him to look at, asks us to avert our eyes for the sake of context or comparison.
I'm with Amanda on this: what we have here is actually a rape crisis, and more exactly a crisis produced by rape culture.
And Im with B, who announced via FB or twitter or something last week that she is probably done identifying as a Catholic. I think I'm done, too. The points I made in this post still hold and are still identification points for me. But the dogma, the actual belief-system, the ideology - all the abstractions - are too irrelevant to my own paradigm for me to continue to claim any connection to what remains. The culture, being culturally Catholic, is too poisoned. Probably has been for a long time, but I am looking hard this time. The culture is poisonous and it wants no redeeming from me. And so, fight the real enemy, I now feel sure. (goddamit I wish I could embed that)
What we have here, in other words, is a failure to communicate,
My god, how lucky we are that someone is around to stick up for the poor disempowered Catholic church.
Sometimes I ask my students in 100 level classes to discuss the extent to which we are living in a patriarchy. I do the thing where I say, 'if an alien came to the planet and look around, would it conclude as much?' And while most of them realize, yes, it would, always a handful of students (always male) want to talk about how if the alien could somehow look at how far we've come, the progress we've made, could compare our enlightened culture to the barbarians in the middle-east, well, surely then the alien would realize how commendable we are! Just happened yesterday, in fact. Always someone is unwilling to look at the actual unflattering thing I asked him to look at, asks us to avert our eyes for the sake of context or comparison.
I'm with Amanda on this: what we have here is actually a rape crisis, and more exactly a crisis produced by rape culture.
And Im with B, who announced via FB or twitter or something last week that she is probably done identifying as a Catholic. I think I'm done, too. The points I made in this post still hold and are still identification points for me. But the dogma, the actual belief-system, the ideology - all the abstractions - are too irrelevant to my own paradigm for me to continue to claim any connection to what remains. The culture, being culturally Catholic, is too poisoned. Probably has been for a long time, but I am looking hard this time. The culture is poisonous and it wants no redeeming from me. And so, fight the real enemy, I now feel sure. (goddamit I wish I could embed that)
Labels: Catholicism, rape culture
Posted at 12:33 PM
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